IRS Expects a “Miserable” Tax Season

Some news in brief from here and there:

The
IRS
Commissioner and the National Taxpayer Advocate are each predicting that
the upcoming federal income tax filing season will be especially
challenging for the agency. Indeed they’re throwing around adjectives like
“miserable,”
“worst,” and “unacceptable” and they haven’t even really gotten started
yet.

Among the factors making this year particularly bad are the
launch of Obamacare’s tax credits (and penalties), hostility from
Congress, and uncertainty in tax law because Congress has yet to decide
which expiring tax laws it will retroactively extend at the last minute.

Good luck getting help from the agency over the phone if you
get confused. They’re expecting to be able to answer only about half of
the calls they get, after an average on-hold time of over a half-hour, and
even then will only be able to answer the most elementary tax
questions.

All of this is bound to increase taxpayer
frustration and anger towards the tax-collecting bureaucracy, as well as
making it a more unpleasant place to work.

You may have heard of mass protests in Mexico over the government’s
collusion in massacres of student demonstrators there recently. The
protesters have admirably started burning government buildings including the statehouse in Guerrero and the headquarters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
A side-note of interest here is that some businesses in Acapulco, Guerrero, have launched a tax strike to
protest the government’s failure to protect the tourist trade from the
losses caused by demonstrators!

Find Out More!

For more information on the topic or topics below (organized as “topic →
subtopic →
sub-subtopic”), click on any of the ♦ symbols to see other pages on this site that cover the topic. Or browse the site’s topic index at the “Outline” page.